Posted in anniversaries, art, body, cars, children, commerce, cultural, cycles, denmark, design, development, diary, environment, establishment, experience, family, finland, food, language, location, media, nature, occupation, organisations, patriarchy, pedestrian, person, provision, public, sculpture, society, time, tourism, trains, transport on September 5th, 2010 No Comments »
We’ve both just returned from Copenhagen: a conference trip for me, a birthday holiday for K. Denmark is an oddity: much as Finland looks Scandinavian when you squint, Denmark looks a little Germanic when you don’t.
The capital city is wonderful in a lot of ways: it has London’s green lungs, and a brilliant public transport [...]
We soon come to the end of our first year of owning a garden. I have learnt since starting to fumble around in the earth that you should take at least a year after acquiring a garden, to merely dutifully weed and water and nothing else. That way you can see what really grows in [...]
Posted in employment, entertainment, france, geography, holiday, location, made_our_own_fun, occupation, psychogeography, sport, tourism, travel on March 22nd, 2010 2 Comments »
Last week I went skiing with work. How lucky am I? Well, given I’m not the sort of person who would necessary like skiing—an extrovert’s sport, with potential for showing off and excessive consumption, both of which I grumpily frown on—then the jury would be out. But I loved it.
Obviously the fact that it was [...]
I’ve been a Popperian for years. That’s not to say I’m a fan of Robert Popper (although I am); rather that I susbscribe broadly to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. The basic tenet of it is that science advances only through making audacious predictions; that such predictions are ones that ought, given our existing experience, [...]
Posted in body, education, far_away, food, france, location, occupation, opinion, person, rants, tourism, understanding on September 10th, 2009 3 Comments »
French cuisine is fucking awful, isn’t it? Not French food so much: I know people who’ve eaten some and enjoyed it. But cuisine, the artistry and craftsmanship of cooking, is pretty much dead in France. Ignorant, thick-headed, ritualistic, closed to new innovations, and just plain bad. Like Parisian architecture and the French language under the [...]
Paris was lovely, apart from the food (more on that later.) With alternately gloriously late-summer sunny and heartlessly mid-July rainy—like the most Parisian of love affairs—and with beautiful parks and fantastic architecture, it was a city to melt the heart. The métro was a smooth and cheap experience, with trains running till well after midnight. [...]
It’s raining in Paris. Great umbrellasful of rain, refusing to soak through surfaces as though they were newly waxed, and pouring off the tarmac into the tramlines by the Cité Universitaire, thence down those metal channels as though they were the city’s storm drains. Porte d’Orléans is kept dry by its hill; it doesn’t look [...]
Posted in business, cliques, commerce, development, far_away, friends, location, occupation, organisations, society on August 30th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’m off to a conference tomorrow for a day or two tomorrow. It’s possibly the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had to better myself in my career and in a community I respect, and a great responsibility for me to help my employer and co-workers through presentation of a good corporate face to others and intensive [...]
Most of the days at our parents’ Breton cottage ended up with a lot of red wine and some DVDs. Given that the restaurants that didn’t close were a car journey away and only served meat with meat, it was a good solution to the problem of everyone enjoying their evening.
This also meant K. and [...]
Posted in body, experience, far_away, fatigue, language, location, occupation, person, rare_languages, surprise, tourism on June 29th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’ve been away from blogging for a good couple of weeks now, and physically away from my computer for around ten days. This has been spent in a landline-free, signal-free Breton valley near Guingamp. Every once in a while a journey to a nearby beach would put us in range of a mobile mast and [...]
